writer, editor, modernist, and geek

Mini Review: “World of Tomorrow” (2015)

World of Tomorrow is only 16 minutes long. It’s been nominated for an Oscar, won more than 40 film festival awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film at Sundance Film Festival, and Best Animated Short at SXSW. I’d be surprised if it’s not at least nominated for some of our genre awards (I put it on my Hugo list, for example). Created entirely by Don Hertzfeld, it takes science fiction staples – cloning, time travel, space travel, singularity, robots, and aliens – as fact, and then uses that backdrop to tell a dark but loving story focused entirely on humanity. The shiny scifi bits exist but don’t matter nearly as much as one woman talking to one little girl about everything that gave her life meaning.

The animation has been called “avant-garde”, but though I liked it, it didn’t seem that far out of the realm of what’s been done before. It suits the story, which matters; the voice actors are also perfect, and in fact, Hertzfeld recorded his four-year-old niece while she was playing, and then edited her into the film as the main character’s younger self.

World of Tomorrow is excellent storytelling, and is a spot-on example of how I like my fiction: character-driven, a little bleak, a little frightening, fully aware of our own mortality, but hopeful, too. What is it to be alive? What makes you, you? Hope isn’t granted without working for it, and love isn’t free, but if you live every day the best that you can, at the end, you’ll have had a full life.

2 thoughts on “Mini Review: “World of Tomorrow” (2015)”

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